In it we see a street preacher in London being arrested for preaching outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, on church property. Two Bible verses sprang to mind.

When Our Lord Jesus Christ was arrested by temple officials in the garden of Gethsemane, he said to them, “When I was daily with you in the temple, ye stretched forth no hands against me: but this is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53).

Jesus preached in and around the temple in Jerusalem. The authorities hated it, but didn’t dare move against Him in broad daylight. They had to do it under cover of darkness, for no one to see.

After His ascension into heaven, His disciples preached in the temple and they were arrested–by day. Officials ordered Peter not to preach Christ anymore, to which he answered, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

I’m not sure which of these verses applies here, because I don’t know what the laws were in Jerusalem at the time, nor do I know what the law is in London today. But I do know that church property is private property.

If I were to cross the street and preach on the steps of St. Francis Cathedral, I doubt the church would tolerate it indefinitely–although some of the local teens use those steps as a skateboard rink and I’ve never seen the police chase them away. I’m pretty sure the church would eventually demand that I go somewhere else, and call the police if I refuse. Not that I intend to put this to the test: getting arrested is not something I need in my life just now.

They didn’t arrest Jesus openly because they were afraid of Him, and afraid of the people who flocked to hear Him. My personal belief is that some of the temple authorities already knew that Jesus was indeed the Son of God, and that’s why they had Him crucified: they feared His authority would be greater than theirs.

They were a bit afraid of Peter and John, too, because the disciples had performed miracles of healing and the people were coming more and more to see them. They wound up persecuting the disciples, too, when arrests and beatings couldn’t silence them.

I don’t think these dynamics were involved in the arrest of the street preachers in London. Again, I have to be careful because the video doesn’t give us the church officials’ side of the story.

On the whole, though, I think I have to agree that the churches’ property rights must be respected. If anyone can preach on church property, that could open a can of worms that wouldn’t be easy to close. What if an atheist stood on church property and preached atheism? It could start a riot. Or a Muslim, or a scientologist, or a cultist? You see the problem.

In our country, unlike anywhere else, our First Amendment protects our free exercise of religion. We ought to guard it zealously, and take back ground that has been wrongfully taken from us. Even so, we cannot come onto private property uninvited and preach whatever we want to preach.

In East Lansing, Michigan, a few years ago, a band of “gays” invited themselves into a church and disrupted the services (http://lansingcitypulse.com/article-2302-Gay-anarchist-action-hits-church.html). They said they were doing some preaching of their own. Most of them left before sheriff’s deputies could arrive. The church chose not to press charges, and as far as I know, the incident was not repeated.

No Bible study, no group prayers, no hymn-singing, no crosses on doors–it’s all been banned, thanks to a “complaint” made to the government’s “Fair Housing” agency. I am at a loss to understand how this is “fair.”

Do we still have a First Amendment? If so, where is it?

There is, of course, a lawsuit filed against this high-handed decree. We can pray it succeeds. But why should we need a judge to tell us we can listen to Christian music, and come together to share it, if we want to? And what if the judge says no?

Another thing I can’t understand is why a country in which the vast majority of people are Christians seems to be governed solely in the interests of a tiny, rabidly Christian-hating minority–and why we put up with it. We wouldn’t have put up with it in 1776. Why do we put up with it now?

When I was a newspaperman, I sometimes encountered politicians and other characters with high opinions of themselves who demanded to approve and alter my story before I published it. This was shockingly bad form, and I told them so. Some of them understood. I mean, if we can’t report it like we saw it and we heard it, there’s no point in reporting it at all.

But now bad form seems to be gaining the upper hand. Remember this incident at Smith College, just a couple years ago?

Who can deny it? But to his argument I would like to add the observation that the proposed limitations on speech are mostly coming at us from the Hard Left/Democrat Party–while they themselves enjoy absolute freedom to say and publish anything they want, no matter how wrong, how vicious, how inane, how jejune, how childish, how spiteful, or how mean-spirited it might be.

We Christians and our friends are expected to just suck it up, yum yum, when we hear collidge prefessers and other pinheads declare that everything we hold dear and sacred is evil and stupid, white people are responsible for all the ills of the world and must be punished for it, every “value” in play before 1990 is wrong and must be erased along with the people who hold to them, America is a racist sexist stinking country and must be punished, only black lives matter, yours don’t–and on and on and on, no end to it. The past eight years have been especially trying.

Democrats, with a straight face, propose that people be “investigated” for the Crime of Climate Change Denial. What would they say if Republican Senators huddled with a Republican attorney general and discussed RICO sanctions against persons who had committed the Crime of Climate Change Affirmation–and made that a plank in their national party platform? Think they’d be upset? Think they’d invoke their First Amendment rights?

We are expected to listen to them, or at least not try to shut them down. Let’s make that a two-way street, shall we? See, we already have a frightfully good idea of what government restrictions on free speech would look like. The Democrats and their colleges have shown it to us.

A lot of this problem would go away if the government would stop funding universities. And we would be a better country for it.

How does Macron define “fake news”? Is it just reporting things that aren’t true? Gee, he’d have to ban almost all the America nooze media. Like, really–babbling away on Election Night, 2016, about Hillary’s impending landslide victory: how fake was that? Or the New York Times, year after year, printing Walter Duranty’s lies about the workers’ paradise being created in Russia by Stalin? It was all lies, and they got a Pulitzer Prize for it.

When you make laws against “fake news,” you have to anoint somebody to decide what’s fake and what isn’t, and that’s where the whole idea goes wrong. Suddenly “fake news” is any news critical of the punks in power. Try to imagine Loretta Lynch with the power to label and prosecute “fake news.” It ought to make your hair stand on end.

Our First Amendment guarantees, by law, the freedom of the press–without adding that the press is, of course, free to report all the news deemed “not fake” by the government. Because that freedom comes with no strings attached, we have always had to put up with “journalists” who are something less than a credit to their profession. We have always had to put up with a certain amount of bogus news. Our mainstream nooze media is, frankly, a disgrace. But because the First Amendment prohibits putting fetters on the press, alternative news outlets, made possible and effective by the Internet, have been able to develop and thrive.

Confound these power-hungry empty suits, like Macron, who are always trying to chop down the tree of liberty! Always for our own good, of course–which they know, but we don’t.

The partisan nooze media we have to tolerate now is an annoyance.

But giving some government dummy the power to decide what news is fake and what isn’t–well, that would be a lot more than just annoying.

In Augusta, Maine, a public school employee was recently disciplined with “coaching”–can these people do euphemisms, or what!–for saying, in a private conversation with another employee who is also a member of her church, “I will pray for you.”

Well, hey, hey! She was “instructed” never to say such a thing in any private conversation. Hello! Aren’t private conversations private anymore? Not in a public school, they aren’t. The employee has filed charges against the school district for religious discrimination.

Even more disturbing, school officials told her that she cannot use “phrases that integrate public and private belief systems.”

Whoa! Hold it right there! Since when does America have any “public belief system”? Has the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment been repealed? Did it happen while we slept? Who established a “public belief system” that binds us all? (“One ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them…” –Tolkien)

These people have got to be sent packing, before we all wake up behind barbed wire. Who do they think they are?

It’s simply “undebateable,” says this Stalinist wannabe, that we must kill our First Amendment to protect the fragile feelings of “minorities,” who must be rigidly shielded from ever hearing anything they don’t want to hear. It’s necessary to silence some of the people–us, he means–for the good of “a greater group of people.” This is what has been learned, he prates, by studying postmodernism and other forms of fractured logic.

He goes on to praise the Soros-funded thugs of Black Lives Matter, and other violent “protesters,” for “keeping watch over the soul of our republic.”

Don’t even ask for his definition of a “republic.” It’s bound to make no sense. For that matter, I’m not sure I want to find out what he means by “soul.”

So how about it, America? Are you ready now to stop pouring money into these institutions of “higher learning”? Or isn’t the pot boiling hot enough for you yet?

And the nooze media are on it, oh, yeah: calling it a battle of “the alt-right” vs. “anti-fascists.”

Is that honest? Is the Pope an astronaut? I still don’t know what “the alt-right” is, beyond being a pejorative term used by libs and progs. As for “anti-fascists,” well, that’s a nice term for a bunch of Stalinist wannabes who always act like fascists, isn’t it?

Here is a simple truth. Democrats do not believe in free speech, and will destroy it if they can. Any speech that doesn’t conform exactly to their own bizarre little worldview is “hate speech” and must be suppressed–violently suppressed, if need be. Like it is at Berkeley.

Political leftism has evolved (I get extra credit for saying “evolved”!) into a weird alternative religion whose idols are the state and pseudo-science and whose only creed is power.

It must be confronted, opposed, and utterly defeated wherever it exists.

May God give us the strength, the courage, and the resolve to do so. In Jesus’ name, amen.

She has attributed opposition to her scheme to “misogyny.” Well, Ann, your idea would suck just as much if you were a man.

The Constitution is the law of the land, written in language that just about anybody can understand. But we all know what Democrats and other libs think of that whole “law of the land” business. Check out their position on immigration laws.

Gee, they’d sure be unhappy if Donald Trump ever proposed controlling political speech from his end of the stick. But we all know their position on hypocrisy, too: it’s only hypocrisy when someone else does it.

If we don’t exercise and defend our freedoms, there are a lot of people who’d be only too glad to take them away from us.

Rove joins the usual gang of libs ‘n’ progs who think disarming the American people is going to make them safer, and that criminals, confronted with a total gun ban, will just snarl “Curses, foiled again!” and just forget to obtain guns illegally.

Be careful–it’s not just the Second Amendment that our beloved rulers want to take out. Obviously the First Amendment is on their hit list, big-time. And all the others, by and by.

You see, they view the Bill of Rights as something that gets in their way every time they want to do anything really sweet for the American people, like Saving the Planet or Creating a Utopia.

Dude! That’s precisely what it’s for–to get in your way!

But if we don’t defend those rights–well, they don’t intend to let us keep them. No way they’re gonna let us keep them.